This Day in Russian History (Lenin Final Rites Strengthen Stalin’s Hold on Power)

Jan. 27, 1924—The Moscow funeral of V.I. Lenin, who seven years before had led a small cadre of revolutionaries to seize power over a Russian population of 158,000,000, took on all the characteristics of a secular sanctification, with the city of Petrograd renamed in his honor and even a special mausoleum containing his carefully preserved body erected in a mere three days.

Braving temperatures 35 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, lines of mourners more than a mile long waited patiently to segue past his coffin.

Already signaling the credulous reporting he would display in downplaying the Soviet terror famine of the early 1930s, The New York Times’ Walter Duranty reported that the Lenin-related pageantry would lay “the foundation of a revival campaign to infuse new energy, enthusiasm, unity, and discipline in the Communist party.”

While acknowledging an attack by Lenin’s emerging successor, Joseph Stalin, on his rival, Leon Trotsky, the day of Lenin’s death, Duranty brushed it off, seeing potential for harmony in the offing:

“The best-informed people here are confident that Trotsky, Radek, and other insurgents will join hands with the ‘machine’ leaders, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, over Lenin’s grave. If Trotsky gives no sign to the latter, they may make the first step toward reconciliation.”

No such “reconciliation” took place. Unity would be achieved by fear and capitulation.

This was more than the kind of mass grief that followed, for instance, the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy in the United States. 

This was a form of mass indoctrination, a means of smothering internal dissent about the meaning of Lenin’s life and the Soviet regime he had agitated, plotted, and fought to bring into being, and the beginning of what became a familiar sight for decades: 

The entombment of the Communist leader, performed against the express wishes of his family and several key Party leaders, reflected the wishes of Stalin, who—mindful of the traditional Russian Orthodox Church belief that a divine body would not deteriorate—used the last rites to position himself as Lenin’s successor and to help fashion his own “cult of personality.”

Somehow, architect Aleksei Shchusev managed to build this temporary mausoleum within the three days that Stalin allotted. Then he was asked to revise his plans twice more, with each revision producing a more grandiose structure.

What ordinary Russians couldn’t perceive over several decades was the sleight of hand needed to manufacture all this reverence. A phrase from The Wizard of Oz comes to mind: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, published after the collapse of the USSR, noted that control room staffers supervised the optimal temperature and degradation of Lenin's corpse, and that beneath the mausoleum there was also a workout room for the guards, in which the reporter imagined "some pimply kid from Chelyabinsk doing squat thrusts."

In addition to successfully wrapping Stalin in Lenin’s mantle, the creation of Lenin as a revolutionary icon later served the purpose of Stalin’s opponents. The ceremony at Red Square substituted a revolutionary form of devotion for a religious one, with Lenin joining Karl Mark as the crucial icon.

With Stalin’s unmasking as a paranoid director of a police state a few years after his death in 1953, Lenin became the great “what-if” alternative for Communists who couldn’t abide any questioning of the legitimacy of the U.S.S.R.—or, according to Lenin biographer Christopher Read, “a ‘good’ Lenin, a democrat blown off course by Russian backwardness and the exigencies of the [Soviet] Civil War, as opposed to a ‘bad’ Stalin.”

Starting in spring 1922, three strokes had progressively undermined the Soviet leader’s health and, more important for the state he hoped to direct, limited his day-to-day control of Party affairs.

With his physical strength waning but his anxiety mounting, he sought to stave off a split between two of his closest associates, Stalin and Leon Trotsky, that might divide the Soviet leadership while he was alive and spark a succession struggle after his death.

Yet, though he chastised both men for behavioral traits that gave rise to tension in the ranks, he viewed Stalin—to whom he had often turned to implement his directives—as s figure who should be blocked from assuming ultimate authority in the state.

As Lenin grew feebler, he had attempted to curb Stalin’s increased accumulation of power by issuing in late December 1922 a “testament” to the Communist Party’s Central Committee. As General Secretary of the committee, he noted, Stalin now possessed “unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.”

A couple of weeks later, after Stalin had insulted Lenin’s wife, the ailing leader went further in an addendum to his report, observing that the younger man’s rudeness was intolerable in a party leader, and that the committee should “think about a way of removing Stalin from that post” and appoint somebody “more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”

When Stalin’s death came in 1953, he joined his old chief in the mausoleum. But his period as an object of devotion was much shorter. 

After Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” to the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing his crimes, it was only a matter of time—five years, to be exact—before he was removed from Lenin’s tomb and re-buried in a far humbler resting place.

But the cult of Lenin remained intact for decades more. “Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live” became a longtime mantra of Soviet society, and even beyond, as the ubiquitous image of the international Communist movement at parades. Amid regimes that placed a premium on censorship, his works continued to be produced in mass quantity, year after dreary year.

There was far less distance than one might suspect between the current dictator of the sprawling Russian land mass named Vladimir and the one a century ago. (Lenin’s initials, V.I., stood for “Vladimir Ilich.” His surname was adopted as a pseudonym to evade the Czar’s secret police.)

Russia’s first kleptocratic ruler and the world’s first Marxist dictator embraced the same means to power: ruthless force that crushed opponents. 

Indeed, Vladimir Putin learned about the dark arts of poisoning, targeted assassinations, even striking at critics in foreign lands as a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB, a descendant agency of the Cheka, or Soviet state security police, set up by Lenin and under the direction of Felix Dzerzhinsky.

For a deeper, contemporary consideration of Lenin’s legacy—not just in the Soviet Union well into the glasnost era, but even among American right-wingers like Steve Bannon who emulate the Communist’s style of disruption if not his ideology—Cathy Young’s recent article from The Bulwark is well worth reading.

Quote of the Day (Masha Gessen, on How Midcentury Totalitarianism Led to Unusual Soviet Population Policies)

“For decades now, the Soviet Union had been trying, and failing, to recover from the catastrophic population loss caused by the Second World War and the Gulag extermination system. The thrust of the population policies initiated by [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev was to get as many women as possible to have children by the comparatively few surviving men. The policies dictated that men who fathered children out of wedlock would not be held responsible for child support but the state would help the single mother both with financial subsidies and with childcare: she could even leave the child at an orphanage for any length of time, as many times as she needed, forfeiting her parental rights. The state endeavored to remove any stigma associated with resorting to the help of orphanages, or with single motherhood and having children out of wedlock. Women could put down a fictitious man as the father on the child's birth certificate—or even name the actual father, without his having to fear being burdened with responsibility.”— Russian-American journalist, author, translator, and activist Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017)

The massive Soviet casualties in WWII (27 million) and the Gulag, labor colonies, and prisons from 1931 to 1953 (1.7 million) are only dimly known to the wide American public. Even less understood are the consequences of this for subsequent government policy.

Masha Gessen’s careful analysis of all this, in the broader context of the broad-based psychological despair experienced by so many in Russia, reveals something eye-opening about how totalitarian rule (in the form of one country waging war not only on another but even on its own citizens) creates ripple effects that need to be analyzed and absorbed. 

It may be some time before we can fully grasp what is going on now in Russia under Vladimir Putin and China under Xi Jinping. But it is surely not the "strength" that they proclaim or their acolytes in the West blindly accept.

This Day in Cold War History (‘Porgy and Bess’ Staged in Leningrad, at Soviet and US Turning Points)

Dec. 26, 1955—In the first American theater troupe appearance in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution, the international touring company of Porgy and Bess performed in Leningrad.

The massive company, nearly 100 strong, presented the 1935 “folk opera” by George and Ira Gershwin amid simultaneous watersheds in U.S. and Soviet history. In America, the civil-rights movement was picking up momentum with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision and the onset of the Montgomery bus boycott. In the U.S.S.R., Nikita Khrushchev, having been named secretary of the Communist Party, was gauging how to expose Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian abuses.

In this atmosphere, the production by the Everyman Opera Company became a vehicle for political controversy, as this work had been since its Broadway premiere 20 years before. Then, it was a matter of domestic dispute: How accurate was its depiction of African-American life? Now, many wondered if the Soviets would use the show to highlight American racial inequality as Marxism competed against the free-enterprise system in the postwar order.

So much intrigue and suspense surrounded the event that it received unusually extensive press coverage, including by CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr and Truman Capote, stepping away from novels, musicals and film scripts to venture into creative nonfiction for The New Yorker Magazine. Capote’s chronicle of the epic trip, The Muses Are Heard, became his first significant step into the genre that he would transform with In Cold Blood.

The all-black cast (insisted on from its Broadway premiere) of the Everyman group had already been touring for four years, including a triumphant stop earlier that year before a demanding Italian audience in Milan's La Scala to perform the theater's first American opera. But the stakes were far higher when Everyman director and co-producer Robert Breen led his company into Russia.

Throughout the international tour, the group had been sponsored by the U.S. State Department. But funding was denied for the Russian leg of the long tour because the State Department felt the Soviets would use this depiction of poverty in Charleston’s Catfish Row in its propaganda war against America.

Instead, funding was handled by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and as the Everyman group prepared for the show, they anxiously considered whether they were being watched by their hosts and how they should answer incessant questions about the civil-rights struggle going on back at home.

It is hard not to read Capote’s account without admiration for the intelligence, talent and dignity of its African-American cast, each member balancing fidelity to an imperfect country that could easily be embarrassed on the world stage with their commitment to truth and justice.

It is equally difficult to read Capote without rolling one’s eyes at State Department representatives addressing the cast in carefully calibrated terms, at other whites along for the ride (e.g., Ira Gershwin’s wife Lenore on rumors that their hotel rooms would be wired: “Where are we going to gossip? Unless we simply stand in the bathroom and keep flushing…”) and at Capote’s trip through a local department store.

Despite some jitters before and during the performance on how Soviet listeners were reacting (Bess’ adjustment of her garter upset some local prudes), the show moved audiences in Leningrad and, later, Moscow. It paved the way for later productions in Mother Russia of My Fair Lady, The Threepenny Opera, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me, Kate, and Sugar.

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on the Nazi Invasion of Russia)

“I see the 10,000 villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this, in hideous onslaught, the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents, fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, so delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey. And behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men who planned, organized and launched this cataract of horrors upon mankind.”— Winston Churchill, radio address on Germany’s invasion of Russia, June 22, 1941

Even as he made history, Winston Churchill sought to shape how it would be interpreted. He didn’t wait until he penned his bestselling six-volume  war memoirs in retirement, nor even as he departed Whitehall in 1945, when he carted off 68 bundles of state papers to help him with this massive proect (as revealed in David Lough’s recently published No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money). 

The British Prime Minister did so, quite memorably, as early as Adolf Hitler’s disastrous decision to abrogate the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on this date 75 years ago today.

Twenty-two months before Hitler’s troops opened fire on the Soviets, without either a declaration of war or even an ultimatum, Joseph Stalin had made a cynical secret deal with his fellow dictator: a division of the spoils that allowed them spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, subjecting that region's inhabitants to exploitation by these conquerors. (See my prior post on the background to the event.)

Though stunned by Hitler’s treachery—initially, it seems, almost to the point of paralysis—Stalin should not have been. Hitler had shown an insatiable appetite for land; he had broken the Munich agreement that Churchill’s predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, had naively negotiated; and, as secret agents and Allied leaders (such as Churchill himself) had told the Soviet dictator, Hitler planned to turn on him.

When he addressed his country after hearing this news, Churchill was already calling it one of four “climacterics,” or “intense turning points,” of World War II. (The others to that point, as listed in the speech, were the British decision to fight Germany alone after the fall of France, the performance of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, and the American decision to provide aid through the Lend Lease Act). This, though, may have been the turning point that sealed Hitler’s fate, for Great Britain would no longer be facing Germany by itself on the battlefield.

In the quote above, Churchill resorted to benign images of the common Soviet folk because he wanted his own countrymen to identify with people who had just become their allies. Even this, however, wasn’t enough. He also felt compelled to acknowledge his own past: “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years.” Nor would he retract a word of it even now.

But the crimes of Hitler were so “monstrous,” he noted, that “We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose….to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.”

Though Hitler had approached the decision to invade the U.S.S.R. with mounting anxiety, he could not shed the same logic that had doomed Napoleon Bonaparte over a century before, General Walther Warlimont would note later:

“Why Hitler invaded Russia is, in my opinion, that he found himself in exactly the same situation as Napoleon. Both men looked upon Britain as their strongest and most dangerous adversary. Both could not persuade themselves to attempt the overthrow of England by invading the British Isles. Both believed, however, that Great Britain could be forced to come to terms with the dominating continental power, if the prospect vanished for the British to gain an armoured arm as an ally on the Continent. Both of them suspected Russia of becoming this ally of Britain’s.”

For all his vivid imagery, Churchill surely could not foresee the extent of the grievous harm inflicted by Germany on the U.S.S.R.: more than 26 million lives lost. Nor, for all the fighting spirit he praised among the Russian common people, could he have anticipated that the Soviet military would ultimately be responsible for approximately 70% of the Wehrmacht loss of life over the next four years, as the powerful German war machine first became trapped by the winter weather, then by Hitler's refusal to walk away from a quagmire. Churchill remained convinced, as he wrote in his memoir The Gathering Storm, that “Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism.”  But he also believed that allying now with the Soviets was the only feasible way to destroy Nazism and to preserve Britain as a nation.

This Day in Cold War History (Khrushchev Denounces Stalin’s Terror in ‘Secret Speech’)

Feb. 25, 1956—In an address that shredded the hopes placed in the Soviet Union by believers around the world, Nikita Khrushchev (pictured) disclosed to the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party that the nation’s former leader, Joseph Stalin, had subjected opponents of his rule to “moral and physical annihilation.”

The night before the speech, Khrushchev faced down high-level Soviet leaders who did not want any news of this kind to come out. They rightly feared that some would ask why they had not acted to stop the terror.

Khrushchev may have wondered the same thing about his own role. His decade as First Party Secretary would be characterized by a hypomania marked by what one psychoanalyst described in a 1960 CIA assessment as exuberance coupled with feeling “covertly ... guilty about aggression towards others, incapable of being alone ... corruptible and lacking a systematic approach in cognitive style.” He improvised a great deal of the speech, even appearing overwrought at times, maybe remembering his own role in carrying out Stalin’s tyranny. (As Moscow leader in the 1930s, Khrushchev ordered the shooting of more than 55,000 officials, according to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.)

During Stalin’s nearly three decades as Soviet dictator, it was suicide to criticize or even joke about him. Nearly three years after his death, nobody still dared to breathe a word about his crimes. Nor, even now did Khrushchev address Stalin’s brutality against the Soviet people at large, let alone other nations undermined and absorbed within the Soviet empire. (Moreover, the first Soviet leader, V.I. Lenin, was upheld as a shining example of everything Stalin had destroyed, with his own crimes not detailed until Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s.)

So when Khrushchev now got around to denouncing Stalin, it was in the context of what mattered most to his immediate listeners, for having “ignored the norms of party life and trampled on the Leninist principle of collective party leadership.” Tumult broke out in the hall when Khrushchev laid out, in categorical detail, a particular example of this:  “of the 139 members and candidates of the party's Central Committee who were elected at the 17th congress, 98 persons, that is, 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-38).”

Like so much about the Iron Curtain, these shattering revelations were made behind closed doors and initially unbeknownst to most Soviet citizens, leading it to be dubbed “The Secret Speech.” But even as it was being delivered (estimates I’ve seen vary as to its length, ranging from four to eight hours), Khrushchev’s belated denunciation of his predecessor’s “cult of personality” had an immediate impact.

The delegates present uniformly listened in shocked, numb silence. The editor of Pravda, concerned that he might have a heart attack, gulped down five nitroglycerin pills, while the head of the Polish Communist Party, being treated in the U.S.S.R. for pneumonia, did suffer a fatal heart attack right after reading it. Still other delegates are believed to have killed themselves afterwards.

In terms of Communist believers beyond the walls of the Kremlin, the effects were not as visceral but ultimately more important for the propaganda war that the U.S.S.R. was waging against the United States and its allies in the Free World. The speech was read once only to party members throughout the Soviet Union in factories, farms, offices and universities.

Polish printers, having obtained the full text meant for distribution to Central European communist allies, printed thousands more than the authorized number. One of these copies came into the hands of Israeli intelligence, who, in the early spring, gave it to the CIA, which in turn leaked it to The New York Times and the British Kremlinologist (and eventual Khrushchev biographer), Edward Crankshaw. After the Times printed it in early June, the speech became fodder for the Voice of America and the U.S. Information Agency in their campaign against “Red Colonialism.”

In Poland and Hungary especially, the speech catalyzed resentment against Soviet puppet regimes, and though this unrest was smothered in the former and brutally crushed by Soviet troops in the latter, ordinary citizens now knew the extent of the crimes of their Communist overlords.

For longtime American apologists of the Soviet regime, the speech put them face to face with what they had long tried to avoid.  As Harvey Klebr, John Hayes, and Kyrill Anderson write in The Soviet World of American Communism:

“For more than 20 years, both the mainstream press and scholarly books had carried hundreds of stories, refugee accounts, and exposes of the nature and horrors of Stalin's regime. Yet although the insistence of American Communists that the news was a revelation was literally false, it was psychologically true. Since the beginning of the movement, American Communists had worn special glasses that allowed them to see only what Moscow saw and that rendered all else invisible. But when Moscow finally opened its own eyes, when Khrushchev pointed to the bodies of Stalin's victims littering the Soviet landscape, American Communists saw those bodies as well. And this vision offered a shattering revelation.”

Like Mikhail Gorbachev three decades later, Khrushchev mistakenly believed that the Soviet Union could be reformed from within. The revelations about Stalin were meant to energize a rank and file still suffering from the impact of Stalinist terror. As painful as his knowledge of his complicity was, he felt, light had to be shed on this shadowy past. "All of us were involved in this,” he recalled in his memoir. “And we have to tell the truth about everything."

Quote of the Day (Boris Pasternak, on ‘People Who Have Never Fallen or Stumbled’)

''I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.'' —Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1958)

He might have made his reputation among his countrymen for his poetry, but Boris Pasternak—born on this date 125 years ago in Moscow—became best known in the West for a novel, Doctor Zhivago, whose physician-poet title character is, to a large extent, based on the author himself. The Kremlin, disturbed by the book’s depiction of the harsh life endured by citizens under Communism, refused to allow him to travel to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was not until nearly 30 years later that publication of the novel was finally permitted in his own country, and that his son was allowed to pick up the award for the poet, who died in 1960.

I see, from billboards in Times Square, that Pasternak’s epic novel of his country on the brink of revolution is being adapted into a musical. For legal reasons, I can’t imagine that the show’s creators will be able to use “Lara’s Theme,” the instrumental theme that became just as famous as the 1965 David Lean film adaptation in which it appeared. But I'll be interested to see how the show does--particularly how well it resolves the ending, which I found problematic onscreen (and which a number of readers did when they encountered it in print).